I felt the wind brushing over me, and I gently opened my eyes. First it felt like I just woke up from sleep as usual, then it began to feel awkward and uncomfortable.
There was that coldness and emptiness taking over me, making me feel uneasy. I shook my head and squeezed my eyes tight just to get a hold of myself.
The last thing I could remember was me kneeling in font of Pahpa and his boys. I remembered I heard him saying he was going to kill me.
Apart from those, I remembered nothing else.
I was floating in the air like a balloon. Very lightweight and transparent like a typical ghost would be.
The event just happened, but it felt like my eyes were closed for a century. It took me a long while before I could wake up after dropping my body.
"So this is what death feels like." I thought.
I couldn't stop examining my new form. The ghost that I'd become, completely different from my flesh and blood.
A loud noise snapped me out of my self examination. I quickly turned to see what was going on.
I saw a woman screaming and crying over something laying on the ground, surrounded by a crowd.
Curiosity took hold of me and I moved slowly in the air, still floating like a balloon. I flew passed the crowd and beheld… my death body.
The body looked terrible. At first glance, one could tell that I passed through torture and a gruesome death.
After staring at it for while, I saddly turned to leave but stopped when I heard a someone asked a question.
"Can you give me a vivid description of what happened here?" The person asked.
I got interested in the person's question. When I turned , I saw the person adorned in police uniform. He and other police personals came to the scene to make inquires.
One person stood out of the crowd to attend to the police. He answered the question.
"What happened terrified all of us." He said. "We were just sitting here when we saw the deceased running around carelessly. Before we could warn him of the dangers of the road, that car ran him over." He pointed to a slightly damaged car.
The police man remained attentive.
The man continued: "As if that was not enough. His body fell into that Power transformer and that was how he was electrocuted to death."
"Lies!" I shouted, but of course no one could hear me, I was already a ghost.
"Is that all?" The policeman asked.
"Yes Sir, That is all." The man answered.
At that moment, I felt an anger rising from my feet up to my ghostly body.
"Pahpa didn't just killed me, but he forced these people to lie and give a false testimony?" I thought to myself.
Some minutes later, the police delegated some people to wrap my death body and take it away. I watched as my body got carried away from me. That was when everything dawned on me.
"Oh I am truly death."
With a fell expression, I flew over to a nearby hill, and there I settled. I couldn't vividly remember exactly how Pahpa separated me from my body but I knew for sure that the information given to the police was a complete lie.
Pahpa killed me. A friend turned enemy.
He was my brother whom I betrayed. He couldn't forgive me, vowed to kill me and then he did.
From the hill, I watched the entire community outskirt. I raised my head to look at the sky. I opened my mouth in awe of how clear and high definition the sky looked.
It was as if a veil was dropped from my eyes. I could see things I couldn't see before. Perhaps being a ghost wasn't all that bad.
I knew the name of my murderer because he was too dear to me, I also knew that I betrayed him because it was a deeper experience. But I was finding it too hard to remember every event that led to my death.
If I was alive, I wouldn't need to suffer myself to remember, because my brain would help.
As a living human I had an obsession with things metaphysical and the occult. I'd read books on the afterlife, ghosts and the lands of the deaths.
I was able to learn that ghosts may not remember a lot of things because they no longer carry the physical brain around. Only events that had deeper impressions in a person could be remembered.
While I was worrying about remembering those events, a chilling realization hit me.
My eyes widened in fear, my body began to shiver. Confusion began to grow from within me.
"I died." I said. "But how am I still here on earth?"
As a ghost I could forget everything but not heaven or hell. Since childhood, we were taught and given the impression that the moment someone dies, they go to either heaven or hell.
Good people go to heaven and bad ones go to hell, but In my own case, I was in neither of those places.
I sighed in relief because atleast I didn't go to hell. That knowledge played a key role in calming me down.
"Ok I didn't go to hell, but I am not in heaven either." I thought. "Why? What happened to me?"
I thought deep about it, asked myself even more questions but couldn't find any answers, and because of that, I bowed my head and closed my eyes and slumbered in despair.
I felt the wind brushing over me again just like I felt the first time. Gently, I opened my eyes, only this time, tears rolled out of it.
I saw myself lying on the hilly ground, no longer floating, but more coarse, life-like, fully conscious and aware. I had no idea how long I went off but it felt like a really long time.
I once read in the books, that out of pains and exhaustion, ghosts could fall asleep for a very long time. Perhaps that was the experience I'd gone through.
Anyone who could see me wouldn't ever imagined that they saw a ghost. I could feel my body and even my face, everything came back to normal, as if I never died.
Since I couldn't float again, I decided to take a walk down the hill. The moment I raised a foot, I felt as if someone smashed my head with a sleigh hammer.
BANG!
"Ahhhh!" I screamed.
I fell to the ground, held my head tightly and closed my eyes as well. Alas, no one smashed my head with a hammer… they were memories.
Memories came flooding into my head, the speed and frequency of which my head couldn't handle.
"This is agony!" I cried.
The pains didn't stop until the memories concluded their journey into my head, which felt terribly heavy afterward.
Due to the weakness in my body, I couldn't get up from the ground. I laid there like a homeless beggar whom the cold hands of judgement had touched.
While I laid on the ground, crying in agony, everything started coming into light. The memories, the events. How it all lined up, leading to my death. Everything began to make sense.
"Perhaps after remembering everything, It would make sense to me why I didn't go to heaven." I thought.
I manged to get myself up, wiped the tears off my eyes and found a stone to seat upon. There I sat in silence like a monastery monk. I began to remember everything.
But one thing was for sure… The more I remembered, the more pain and anger rose within me.